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Firefighters waged a titanic effort to contain a massive fire lapping at Athens’ eastern suburbs after burning a 30-kilometer swathe through one of the Greek capital’s last forests.

With aerial help expected from Italy, France and Cyprus, around 400 firefighters struggled through the night to contain the wildfire that has reached the residential suburbs of Agios Stefanos, Anthousa, Gerakas and Pallini where sporadic evacuations were under way.

Around 12,000 hectares of land are believed to have been devastated according to officials’ early estimates and the blaze is feared to have damaged or destroyed scores of rural and summer homes.

The fire started late on Friday in a rural area around 40km northeast of Athens, but strong winds pushed it back and forth across a forested area dotted with villages and greenhouses.

Fireproof zones erected on Mount Penteli, the last barrier to the capital, failed to hold the flames late on Saturday when fire-fighting aircraft were withdrawn for the night, and authorities decided to protectively evacuate two childrens’ hospitals, a summer camp and a private psychiatric clinic.

”This is a very significant environmental disaster, perhaps the gravest in recent years,” the prefect of the greater eastern Athens area Leonidas Kouris told ANT1 television.

”We face a great ordeal,” Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis said late Saturday after visiting the fire department operations centre, adding that fire crews were mounting a ”superhuman” effort.

The wildfire on Saturday also burned around Marathon, one of the agricultural areas feeding the capital and the main source of its water supply, and led authorities to relocate missiles and ammunition from a military camp.

The blaze evoked memories of a 2007 wave of wildfires that killed 77 people and destroyed thousands of hectares of forest across the country.

No casualties have been reported so far from the fire which broke out near an area earmarked for a waste disposal facility.